Further Reading

Google released the final version of Android 7.0 Nougat yesterday after months of public beta testing, and people with supported Nexus phones and tablets should all be able to download it soon. But Google favors a staggered rollout for its updates so it can find and squash early bugs, and it may be several days before your phone or tablet actually offers to download and install the update for you.

Impatient early adopters have a couple of options. You can download full system images that require you to wipe your device when you install them or OTA update files that can patch the operating system in place without data loss (the official OTA option is relatively new, and this is the first time Google has offered these downloads for a major update directly).

Both methods require the use of the command line adb and fastboot tools and a little bit of knowhow, and you can follow the directions on those pages if you would like to give it a try. As of this writing, only the Pixel C, Wi-Fi Nexus 9, and Nexus Player files have been posted, but we'll link all the images below as they post for your convenience. These are coming directly from Google's servers, the same as they would if you were using the pages above.

Update: The Nexus 5X image and OTA are up.

Update 2: Two weeks later, the Nexus 6P image is up.

Update 3: As of the October security update, all images are finally available. The below links have all been updated to link to the October 2016 images.

Impatient early adopters have a couple of options. You can download full system images that require you to wipe your device when you install them

I was wondering what a "clean install" was, as previously, that was something I associated with laptop and desktop PCs where if you build your own computer (or perhaps some vendors still do this), the hardrive comes with no OS on it. Well, on any other PC, you can also completely overwrite the OS with a new install (which of course deletes everything you had on the OS partition from before).

If you use the full image (not the OTA file) without modifying them, it flashes images to all the partitions on your device, including userdata, so it is effectively a clean install. There are ways to extract the full image and not wipe your personal data, but you may as well use the OTA files for that.

761 posts | registered 5/9/2007

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites